Happy Pantry: Happy Pumpkin

The only good pumpkin is a carved pumpkin.  They don't serve any purpose other than decoration, right?

Okay - I guess some people like the pie (I'm one of those people)...so two things - and then nothing.  But they do two glorious things.  Once a year.

Happy Pantry: Zompeas!

It's almost Halloween!  Watch out for Zompeas!

eat your peas, before they eat you!

We have a 8x10 print available on our website - www.happy-pantry.com

Charlie Brown, you Pinhead!

"We have things of such good grief to show you"

My obsession with Hellraiser has reached a new low.  I did my original Hellraiser sketch:

And since he had a round head, I kept thinking about Charlie Brown and how his noggin lent itself to Pinhead's pins…in his head.

And then to further complete the circle (or the very long stretch), all you have to do is change blockhead to Pinhead and boom - instant crossover.

I looked up some Charlie Brown reference and picked out colors that were in his sunday comics - this one I completely ignored illustrator and did the entire thing in Photoshop.

Hellraiser Chatterer

While Pinhead had his addiction to acupuncture, The Chatterer, while not very talkative, had such a cool look.  Inside one's mouth, it's a horror show.  Have you ever looked under your tongue?  It's disgusting!  Well Clive Barker's imagination brings this out by pulling back the lips and exposing how brave dentists really are.

Anyhow - this is my version of the Chatterer from the Hellraiser series.  I got into them recently and have been obsessed with drawing the characters.

This was sketched out in photoshop, cleaned up in Illustrator and then painted in Photoshop.

This is Halloween, 2011

Last year we got a group together to do a Mario Brothers theme.  This year we visited the Tim Burton exhibit at the LACMA.  It inspired us to make our own costumes using the Nightmare Before Christmas as our theme this year.

My wife and two friends were Lock, Shock, and Barrel - the three little kids who kidnap 'sandy claws'.  I wanted to be something a bit harder and went with the Mayor.  Every year at Nickelodeon Animation Studio (where we work) they do a costume contest.  So while we were waiting for our turn, a girl dressed as Sally joined us and we all went together. 

We won for 'best entertainment characters'.

There's also a pumpkin carving contest that we entered:

My wife stayed with the theme and carved a Jack Skellington head and painted it white.  It also won!

I changed my plan at the last minute and went with an Angry Birds theme:

the red bird is an orange and the little blue bird is a lime.

 Angry Birds in their natural habitat.

This was part of the process of painting the Mayor head - I did a layer and then hung it to dry while I worked on my pumpkin.  I cut out the pieces for the eye, the nose and the mouth (which is where I saw out of).   The other cone (the white one) was the bottom part of the hat.  The material I used was a light weight black foam, so I had to do an undercoat before painting it gray.

And here are a few pictures of the making of the pumpkins:

The pear was too difficult to work with, so I ended up not being able to do a yellow bird.

precision cutting for Jack Skellington's eyes

Skeletal Panda

What a cute skinless panda!

 Afterwards he wished he hadn't used so much acid...

I did a rough drawing over the weekend for Illustration Friday's topic of "Afterwards."

How I spent my Halloween Weekend - Wario theme

 The entire Mario Party!  From left to right - Yoshi, Luigi, Toad, Mario, A coin box, and Wario (the last two are my wife and I...and as you can tell by how terrific they are, we made our own costumes...the others are cheapy store bought versions)

It's been a long and tiring Halloween week...so much so that we ended up not even wanting to do anything on the actual Halloween night (we ended up walking to downtown Burbank to see a parade of dogs who were in costume).

We spent the week designing our costumes to enter the contest at Nickelodeon.

(I think we lost because our Mario purchased his costume)

My wife painted the coinbox on all sides (acrylics on cardboard box).  I took rain gear overalls and spray painted them purple (you wouldn't believe how hard it is to find a pair of overalls of any color, much less a men's size).  I originally had a different hat that was more 'on model' for the kinds of hats Mario, Luigi, and Wario wear, but while spray painting worked out on the overalls, it wasn't terribly friendly with the hat - so I had to settle for a yellow baseball cap.  I purchased an Indiana Pacers cap (because it was yellow) and used an exacto knife to cut off the logo.  Then I took white felt and cut a half circle (for the hat), and black felt and cut out three W's (one for the hat and one for each glove) and a mustache.  Then I took some white acylic paint and painted the white buttons on the front of Wario's overalls.  The final touch was to take two grocery bags and fill them with wadded up paper to round out Wario's pudgy figure.

You almost can't tell the difference

I also decided to work on a pumpkin design that was a lot harder than anything I've ever attempted before.  It turned out to be quite easy, if a little time consuming.  All you have to do (to get a good design) is print out what you want to do and tape it to the front of the pumpkin.  Then I used an exacto knife to trace the lines into the pumpkin, and a pumpkin knife to cut the chunks out.  It was just that easy!  What nice too, is that I found a little flashlight thing (for 2 dollars) at toys-r-us that acts like a candle, complete with yellow flickering light - and it's better than a candle, because it takes hours to go out.

 In the light it's not as impressive (which is what I blame losing on).

 Here's a close-up of it lit

 and a better shot of it

And, of course, this means I'm going to have to really step it up for the pumpkin carving contest the next year - now that I know this isn't as hard as it looks.

 See ya next halloween!